So they can demonstrate competency and commitment in acquiring knowledge and meeting objectives via a computer?
Hell if it can just gird them to deal with Pearson's wonderful online software then it's a requirement well met, imho.

UOFP get's a lot of that and they have real in person class rooms as well.

They have so many classrooms that it's silly to call Phoenix an online school, unless you also want to include on that list other schools that offer both online and campus based programs, like Berkeley, Georgetown, Brandeis, UNC-Chapel Hill, George Washington University, University of Virginia, etc.

No, it's not to save money. We voted out their stupid "Buy Every Kid A Laptop" to save money program because any moron knew it was going to cost a lot more money then all the teachers they cut to spend the money on Laptops. They just wanted to give HP 150 Million every few years. We voted out the stupid "Lets Bust the Teachers Union" to save money because we're already a right-to-work state, they just wanted to do some useless union busting. We voted against requiring students to have online courses because

1. Someone noticed that kids who took online classes were doing better than average in school. The geniuses in the Idaho state legislature assumed that correlation is the same thing as causation, and thus decided that if EVERYONE took online classes, everyone would do better than they were now.

The majority of people in Idaho live in or around the Boise area you ignorant fuck. We're not all hillbillies. I'm not saying that our legislature doesn't comprise a good portion of ignorant hicks doing what ignorant hicks do, but there are some sensible people here too trying to get somethings changed for the better, especially for our children. It's just really hard to do when you have a republican stranglehold on EVERY conceivable state government outlet.

2. The Idaho legislature spent too much money and/or cut taxes too much. Someone pointed out that teachers cost more money than an internet connection. Someone else suggsted raising taxes to pay for teachers' salaries. That second person was laughed out of the building.

Actually, someone suggested raising taxes to pay for teachers' salaries, and it happened. Once the taxes were raised, the legislature turned around and pointed out you can't earmark a tax for something like teachers' salaries, and spent the money elsewhere in the general budget. This brought things full-circle to 2a, having already foisted 2b on the approving voting public, without teachers seeing a penny.

High school is less about learning information than it is about learning how to learn. Learning from an online source is how a lot of people are going to continue their education after school and being able to learn in that environment is important to success. When you don't know how to code something, do you look at the local colleges for classes or do you Google around for a tutorial? I would encourage high schools to make every student take a self directed course of the student's choice, but there's n

Um, High School (at least in the US) is less about learning anything and more about fitting in and trying to be as popular as possible. For those less inclined to popularity, high school is less about learning and more about trying to survive humiliation and degradation day to day in order to hopefully get to college, where one can then be saddled with explosive nondischargable debt in the hopes of conforming to some vague materialistic notion of a middle class existence.

Maybe the schools in your state need to be improved. I basically didnt need to study in Bio 101 a few years ago because I remembered a lot of the info from 9th grade biology. The math class I was required to take for my degree was several notches below the Calculus, trig, and even algebra 2 classes I took in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. The civics class I took in 10th grade is responsible for a great deal of my working knowledge of how our government works.

You sound bitter. Financial Aid debt sucks for sure. If you don't make enough to keep up with your loan repayments, sign up for either Income Based Repayment (if you're below the poverty line) or Income Contingent Repayment (easier to qualify). It does what it says on the tin, and as an added bonus, if you've continuously fail to make a decent wage the loan debt will be forgiven after 30 years.

Khan Academy classes do little, if anything, to teach the student to learn and seek out information in less structured environments. A link to outside information is rare (vs. links to videos and exercises within Khan Academy that are related to the current video or exercise). Searching within Khan Academy for information on a simple concept can be problematic as well - esp. if you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Although I like Khan Academy and think it could have a role in the classroom, it

Production quality is low as well. The simple thing of making the text as Sal scribbles easier to read, even something as simple as abandoning the black background and using slightly wider lines, would help.

Are Khan Academy original video sources available for download? If we could crowdsource people using video editing software to simply cut out his "umms" and "ahhhs" I think it would be a good start!

There are probably several reasons. One, use of the computer for a course ensures that you must know how to use it. Two, it eases the strain on facilities by requiring fewer in person classes. Three, it enables teachers to use the internet more fully in their class. Fourth, it enables more classes to be taught with the same amount of effort. Fifth, a lot of colleges and universities are going much more toward online classes, so it is useful to get used to them. (In my experience, CS classes have become enti

As long as these online teaching systems cannot eliminate cheating, the earned credits worthless for attesting a basic education (in contrast to extended learning). As a straightforward exploit, one person can register multiple times with different identities and then blindly copy&paste the answers for the questions. While the cheater will still learn more compared to just failing or not taking the course it is questionable whether this method will allow the cheater to learn the required minimum to earn

No, not even in the same ballpark as the kind of cheating that goes on in class.

I never truly realized how bad online coursework was until my kid sister was required to do some of them in her high school this year. She was almost downright encouraged to cheat on them just to keep the classes moving. They were allowed (and supposed to) do coursework at home, and the software they used is so stupid about detecting cheating that it's basically worthless. (The software would forbid new tabs from being opened in

As long as these online teaching systems cannot eliminate cheating, the earned credits worthless for attesting a basic education (in contrast to extended learning). As a straightforward exploit, one person can register multiple times with different identities and then blindly copy&paste the answers for the questions. While the cheater will still learn more compared to just failing or not taking the course it is questionable whether this method will allow the cheater to learn the required minimum to earn

It's bad enough that high school does not teach you anything about what real mathematics is, but putting all this crap on a website endorses it, and makes people accept the fact that there is no high school which actually teaches you mathematics.

Do you know what this is? It's the world's smallest violin, and it's playing just for you.

If students are motivated enough, they can find plenty of online math resources on their own.

What high school *should* be about is Peano arithmetic, logic and *perhaps* some introduction to te *theory* of integration.

You're operating under the incorrect assumption that the only target audience for math courses in high school is future mathematicians. Most people who take math do so, not because they want pure math as a career (although some might), but rather because math is an essential tool for a vast array of careers, among them: engineering, medicine, architecture, accounting, actuarial work, systems analysis, sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), I could go on and on... High school math is about providing

I dont believe it is possible to do Calculus by "rote memorization" except in the very general sense that learning and using rules and patterns is "memorization"-- but then I guess ALL learning must be considered memorization as well.

I have a degree in math and physics and now work as a computer programmer. The most difficult math I've had to deal with is some statistical analysis. What we need to teach our children is critical thinking and analysis, whatever tools they have to work with. Someday people will look to them for an answer, with no cheat sheet or book to refer to. They have to learn to be thorough in their analysis and confident of their conclusions. That is the survival tool kids need.

Most of the "basics" of real math are taught without a good book, so I am struggling to find a good reference, but something along the lines of Hamilton's "Numbers, Sets and Axioms: The Apparatus of Mathematics" would do.

Integration, sin(x), statistic, differential equations and this stuff is, what makes mathematics useful in real life. I don't argue that the very core of mathematics consists of axioms, proofs, theories and so on, but for most people mathematics is the part of "math" that is most used.

I don't argue that mathematics is ubiquitous in sciences, human interaction, society and the rest of the universe even in its pure form. I just say, what the word means for ordinary people and that we can not force them to change the way they understand it.

Forget about numbers, mathematics is an exercise in proper, formulated thought, and if there's anything applicable in the world, it's the ability to think straight.

just an fyi, I only have a high school education, so take what I say below with a grain of salt.

Ok, you are looking at mathematics in a way that probably only around 1% of the population does. In my opinion once you get past simple arithmetic you start getting into the philosophy of problem solving, which is what you are talking about.

Some people get a glimpse of that when they take algebra, but very few advance beyond that.

Axioms, proofs, theories, etc.. are lovely and great, but without sin(), stats, diffy q's and the rest, the other stuff is pointless. Do we REALLY want our mathematics education so "heady" and devoid of understanding of existing knowledge that our kids have to reinvent the wheel? What about a balanced approach that teaches both the body of existing mathematical knowledge as well as how to think mathematically? That might take time and resources away from teaching how to take a federally mandated test, but i

You might as well complain that you dont learn Real Science (tm) in high school, since they never get into advanced biochemistry or quantum physics, or that Orchestra is only "fake" orchestra because they dont churn out NSO candidates. Probably we can throw Civics into the "fake" category too, since you dont learn to litigate or draft bills.

My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.

The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.

So he stopped droning on and things got better? Amazing!
Lecture has always been the most efficient (in terms of planning and energy), least effective educational method. Khan moves the lecture to a new place and adds some limited formative tools. Not really anything new, and is really more of an indictment of how bad most educators are, rather than how good Khan is.
Things *could* be so much better, and certainly much better than Khan, but most of us don't get VC money bankrolling our practice.

My brother is a math teacher who convinced the board of his school system to let him try it in two of his classes. Now the entire school system is moving to Khan for the math program.

The major change in his teaching format is that learning a new concept is now homework (through Khan Academy), rather than him droning on about it in class. Then every morning he gets a report for each student and can see who did well and who didn't. That allows him to concentrate on the students that didn't get the concept in class. Overall he has seen a major improvement in the class as a whole since fewer kids get left without a good understanding of the fundamental concepts.

This is such a simple idea but has so much promise. It's usually called Flip Teaching, where the kids perform exploratory learning at home (what is commonly done during in class time today) and show up to class to do "homework" with the intention that if the work proves difficult, the teacher can step in to educate and make sure the students all have the same capability at the end, instead of simply giving them a failing grade on their homework and skipping on to the next section. It make a lot more sense

It make a lot more sense than a teacher spending 45 minutes reading to the students out of a book (lets be honest, very few teachers are more original than that) and then turning kids loose to figure it out on their own via the take home assignment.

What kind of shitty education did you folks get where things operated this way?

I never had a teacher just read things out of a book. And I never had a teacher turn me loose to learn concepts in homework. When I was a student, concepts were taught in class -- wh

What kind of shitty education did you folks get where things operated this way?

No, the GP is right. Of the 50-some teachers I had from kindergarten through my last year in high school, only ten or so are memorable. The rest were mediocre droids who merely droned on and did little to facilitate true learning. That's the nature of the beast in this country -- due to the fact that 'education' departments in most universities are something of a joke, the discipline doesn't exactly attract the best and brightest. Most of the teachers I know are nice if not all that intelligent. Maybe if te

I had no idea there were schools in which 100% of the populations had access to sufficiently capable computers with broadband access! I can't wait to see how well the kids on free lunch respond to this amazing new standard!

Point taken. And in the case of my brother's school system they are making a point to address this. They have computer labs available before and after school, and it is my understanding that they are going beyond that for special cases.

My wife's school, in Idaho, has been acquiring laptops and iPads for students use for a few years now. They are about to purchase many more iPads because of grant money to eliminate physical text books. For her school it is much cheaper to go to iPads than it is to buy textbooks. Not only do they get current editions constantly they don't have to replace lost or damaged books. They have brokered deals with publishers that assure them current additions for school wide use at a lesser cost than the physical t

Husband of an Idaho teacher. Not specifically an attempt to destroy the unions but was designed to take some of their power away. Lay off teachers? Doubtful. A way of rewarding for doing well? Yes, we received a $3,500 bonus from the pay for performance. How? She is a younger teacher that embraced technology and even with it being her first year she had a higher average GPA in her classes than the others, her class' test scores were higher, and in the math competitions students from her classes dominated th

Actually, the good citizens of Idaho passed a referendum in November to revoke the state law mentioned in the OP. People realized that the governor and his state secretary of education had no clue what they were doing with their education "reforms" and torpedoed all of them.

I really enjoy the fact that this is a clinical study (although, I use that term very loosely here), yet, a film maker is already making a film "which will highlight positives of education, like the Khan Academy pilot in Idaho."
Last time I checked studies and pilots were conducted to figure out if things work. But, like many times before, Khan is assumed to be the answer before anyone even tries it.
(P.S. don't cite Los Altos School District, which had the highest test scores in the state *before* adopt

Interested in academic references/ well researched critiques of the pedagogy of the Khan academy approach. Lots of media coverage about how it's wonderful, revolutionises children's understanding of various school topics, lots of hype.... but I'd be really interested in academic reviews or articles that have tracked children using Khan academy and identifies how well this approach performs compares to other teaching methodologies.

Cheers! really curious to know what sort of research has been carried out to e

What they really need to focus on is making sure the students and teachers have all the resources they need to make this work. What I'm afraid of is this giving the Khan Academy a black eye. Still, having used himself a lot, I think the kids will prefer KA over 19 year old textbooks alone.

Yeah! I'm sure the Kahn academy is rolling in the dough from this arrangement! Wait- what's that you say? Kahn academy's courses are free? Oh... um... EVIL Government socialists! Get your hands off our (publicly financed, ran, and mandated) education!